First You Make a Stone of Your Heart

First You Make a Stone of Your Heart

Part I

C1.1

There is a rhythm to life, and to death, and yet we remain unprepared for that final reality, that the beating heart we know will never understand the infinite. Yet somehow, perhaps when we peer through the sharp lens of time, we find that we have grown accustomed to the idea of that last sharp moment, that singular, defining moment of our passing from existence. Some have accommodated their own gnawing fear through the practice of rituals that are at once very personal yet of origins beyond the arcane, while others have grown content with whatever fate or destiny or even random chance has in store for them. Along the way most grow accustomed to the reality that the best we can hope for is a long life unfettered by pain and that with a little luck, we can dance in our parents' shadows without a care in the world, and that -- again, with a little luck -- our children might dance inside the best shadows we made in our passage. Still, it seems that of all the creatures in this world, only humans have embraced an overarching sense of goodness as a guide to our actions, and conversely, most have repudiated evil in all its many guises. This repudiation, at times, defines the outer contours of our dance. As the shadow of our acquiescence comes to define our sorrows.

Yet we take it for granted that for goodness to exist there simply has to be a countervailing force, this thing we call evil. Yet, indeed, has it been possible that good and evil have never truly existed outside of our mind? But, what of this mind? Was it not this same soaring intellect, the same proud voice that loudly proclaimed that good and evil were the defining limits of our existence? Are we to consign those voices to the entombed reliquaries of an unusable past, as little more than the constructs of a more primitive mind -- a fever that has run its course? Remnants, perhaps, of an age when humans above all else feared the night? When everything was lost in shadow?

But what of the voice of reason? The vaunted vox clamantis in deserto? Why do some heed this call while others turn away and run headlong into the night, consumed by fear?

Could it be, possibly, that these proud minds are the most evil thing of all? Or could it be that the light of reason will, in the end, be our salvation?

But time is an arrow that carries us onward.

Oh, Diogenes! If only we could open their eyes!

C1.2

She sat at the battered old Steinway, drifting along unseen currents as amber candlelight washed over the dark oaken walls of the old dining room. Drifting through a careless melange of Debussy's first Arabesque and Rachmaninov's Liebeslied, she was afloat among notes and passages that had spoken to her all her life, yet she was weaving subtle new emotion with the passages she chose, intonations at once as obscure as they were arcane. No one noticed. Not one head turned, and yet it seemed she had been waiting all her life for someone to turn to her in appreciation and offer even a careless whisper of thanks.

She was playing in the small alcove adjacent to the Grill Room, a hallowed enclave within the St. Francis Yacht Club's main floor, and if she had bothered to look she might have seen the city lights winking on across the far reaches of San Francisco Bay. As it was, she sat erect with her eyes closed, swaying to the tapestry she wove as kelp might on a slackening tide.

Her father was a member of the club and on Saturday afternoons she liked to come and sit by the fireplace, and no one seemed to mind when she played the old piano in the corner. Indeed, most people there seemed to consciously ignore her.

'She's not well, you know...' one hushed note might imply.

'Oh?' a soft, contrapuntal note could often be heard in reply.

'Yes. Schizophrenia, or so I hear...'

'What a pity...?'

But those knowing voices mattered not at all to her, not anymore, not after so many years of taking in their knowing, sidelong glances. Theirs were eyes that could not see, and they spoke in hushed, shallow voices that knew only half-truths -- and yet she loved most of those voices. She knew them, had known them for years, and she had sailed with those voices so many times she could barely remember all their names.

Her 'father' came up after the sun settled into darkness, and he leaned into the old Steinway just as he always did before he spoke to her.

"I'm heading home now, Dev. Did you want to stay a while longer?"

She swayed to the left just a bit as she settled into Gershwin's Love Walked In, but then she shrugged -- playfully -- before she finally relented with a quiet smile and said 'Yes' ever so softly.

"Okay. Try not to stay out too late."

She looked after the man as he walked out into the night, then she returned to her thoughts...and to the currents she alone danced within...and she settled in there for a while.

"Miss Devlin, we closin' now..."

She opened her eyes, noticed the bartender leaning over to gently roust her and she nodded. "Is it midnight already, Jimmy?" she asked.

"Yes, Miss Devlin. You want I should go and get your coat?"

"Thanks, Jimmy. Would you mind?"

"Not a bit, Ma'am. You just wait right here."

She looked around the room, noted embers dying in the fireplace and that a dense fog had settled over the bay, then she noticed a tall stranger sitting in a corner opposite the piano, and that the man was nursing the remnants of a brandy. She thought the sight a little odd, too, if only because she knew every member of the yacht club -- and had for years. Her house, or her father's house, was only a few hundred yards distant, not even a block inland on Baker Street, so it felt to her as if she'd spent her entire life within these walls. And in a way she had.

She looked at the stranger again and felt a sudden wave of unease wash over her, then as she watched he turned and looked her in the eye before he stood and pulled a hood over his head, then the stranger turned and made his way to the main entry foyer and, presumably, then out to his car. Jimmy the bartender returned with her coat, a heavy old US Navy pea-coat, and after the boy helped her into the jacket he walked with her to the foyer.

"You best turn up that collar, Miss Devlin. It feels right cold out there tonight."

She saw the shadow run up one wall and then watched it turn and slide along the ceiling and then out into the night and she wanted to turn and run but she didn't want to make another scene, didn't want Jimmy to have to call her father to come pick her up again, so she turned up her collar and followed the inky shadow out into the night. She walked beside the sentinel rows of eucalyptus down to the dinghy docks, knowing that the shadows were out there somewhere just ahead, out there just waiting for her -- then she saw the man, the tall stranger from the Grill Room -- and he was walking away from her along the beach trail by the Green. She stood near a neatly ordered covey of Etchells 22s racers, watched the man as he walked up to the crosswalk at Marina Boulevard -- but then he simply disappeared, just like all the other shadows passing within and through the clinging fog.

She stood in the stillness and watched for a moment, and by the time she had walked all the way to the Green she realized the tide was in -- and that the black water was close to the mute stones that lined the trail here -- so she stopped by an ancient streetlight and stood in the safety of the pooling light, until she realized the fog was growing colder and was now -- quite suddenly -- impossibly thick.

She stepped back into the fog and made her way quietly along the trail towards home -- but she stopped dead in her tracks when she heard a violent commotion in the water off to her left, and when she turned to look she saw an inky black creature oozing silently out of the water. And as she watched she suddenly realized that the thing was slithering up the stone steps towards her. At first, she thought it must be a large harbor seal but then the quivering creature stood on human-like legs and turned to face her and she didn't know what else to do but scream.

+++++

Kirk Dooley was the first officer on the scene and he took one look at the blood-soaked woman and called dispatch: "6-12, will need a Watch Commander and Homicide at my location, and I think we're going to need the divers..."

Dooley gathered the half-dozen or so witnesses, as well as the woman's father, in the yacht club's parking lot, and as other responding units arrived 'Crime Scene' tape was strung out to cordon off the area adjacent to the Green. Paul Weyland gathered up his 'daughter' and held onto her as she stared off into the night, and Officer Dooley tried to figure out who had seen what and when, scribbling down notes as fast as he could...

Then a large blue step-van pulled into the lot, and two men got out and began suiting up in dive gear. Everyone watched as the divers began hauling their gear down to the water's edge, casting nervous glances at the black water all the while.

Then a baby-shit-green Plymouth Interceptor pulled into the parking lot and Dooley recognized Frank DiGiorgio, one of the detectives from Homicide, get out from behind the wheel, but he wasn't sure he recognized the other detective, even after this other one finally got out of the Plymouth and walked over. But it didn't matter; DiGiorgio would be in charge and he was a real straight shooter, an old-school, no-nonsense cop who could get things done, and besides all that he was clean -- and Dooley knew you couldn't say that about too many of the cops working out of Central these days.

Then a flash of memory came to Dooley. The other guy was from the new group that had just been promoted. Dooley had worked with him in the Tenderloin District together a few years back, too. Callahan, wasn't it?

"Hey, Kirk," Callahan said as he walked up, "how's it hangin'?"

"Good, Harry. You?"

"Can't complain. Look, I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but -- where's the body?"

Dooley nodded towards the water. "That's the thing, Harry. There's not much left."

DiGiorgio walked over when he heard that. "Then what are we doin' out here at two in the a-m, numb-nuts?"

So Kirk switched on his Kel-Lite and shined the beam on a woman's legs, and when DiGiorgio saw they were covered in blood he walked over to her, then he looked at the stones on the trail before he turned to look at the woman again.

But one look was all it took. DiGiorgio knew those faraway eyes; he'd seen them too many times to not know exactly what they meant. Kids coming back from 'Nam these days called it the 'Thousand Yard Stare' -- which was where the mind took refuge when reality became a little too real to deal with. But then Callahan stepped up and looked into the woman's eyes -- and he saw the tremors cross her field of view -- so he leaned closer still -- until she could see nothing beyond the contours of his face.

"What did you see?" Callahan whispered gently. "Tell me. They're gone and they can't hurt you now."

"You can't possibly know that," she whispered in kind.

"It's okay. I won't let anyone hurt you," he added, taking her hands in his.

She looked down, looked at his fingers and then took them in her own and felt each one -- as if she had suddenly recognized a kindred spirit, or an old friend. "Debussy?" she sighed -- as currents passed between sinew and bone.

"Gershwin."

"Even better." Could he be the one, she wondered?

"You can trust me. Tell me what happened."

"It came out of the water."

"What came out? Can you describe it for me?"

"Black. Slimy. At first I thought it...but then it stood and he was huge."

"He? The man you saw..."

"He wasn't a man."

"But you said 'he,' didn't you? You said he was black and slimy? You mean like you saw a man covered in oil?"

She trembled as another memory rattled through her body. "Skin...black...not oil...shiny, almost like a snake, only the eyes were different...amber, and big -- like an owl's eyes."

An old black man walked up, and he nodded as he approached. "I seen it too, Mister. She ain't lyin' none...not one little bit..."

"You were...you saw this thing too?" DiGiorgio scoffed.

"Yessir. I was the second person out here, ran out from the parking lot behind Jimmy, but by then that thing hit him with some kind of rod and dragged what was left of Jimmy back out into the water."

"What?" Callahan said. "Are you saying this thing took someone out into the bay?"

"Yessir, right over there, where all that blood and stuff is."

Which was, Callahan could now see, right where the two rescue divers had just entered the water.

And beyond the water, standing on the sidewalk above the yacht harbor, the tall stranger watched as the creature turned towards the divers, at this new presence in the water, and as the creature swam to face this new threat the tall stranger turned up his hood and turned away before he disappeared into the dancing shadows.

C1.3

"You come in early," Captain Sam Bennett asked Callahan, "or were you here all night?"

Callahan stifled a yawn and nodded. "All night. Got called in at 0100, a weird one down at the marina?"

"Weird? What happens around here that ain't weird?"

Callahan shook his head. "Girl walking from the yacht club to her house saw a black thing and screamed..."

"A huge black thing? Now that's a new one...he didn't by any chance rape her, did he?"

Callahan shook off the interruption and continued: "...and this thing came for her, but a couple of workers from the yacht club heard her scream and ran over to see what's what and the black thing turned and it just obliterated one of 'em. The other guy gets the girl back up to the parking lot and then calls us. Divers went in looking but they couldn't find anything..."

"No body?" Bennett asked, his curiosity now piqued.

"No, and I mean nothing. Though one of the divers said he saw something like a big green bubble..."

"Oh come on! What is this -- some kind of April Fool's Day bullshit? Like maybe the diver farted in his wetsuit and a big green bubble..."

But Callahan shook his head. "I saw it too, Captain. So did DiGiorgio."

"What? A big green bubble? You saw a big green bubble -- and that's our prime suspect in a homicide case?"

"We saw a greenish glow underwater, but as soon as the divers went in to investigate, the thing just moved off into deep water..."

Bennett looked up from his coffee when he heard that. "Possible submarine?"

"Maybe, but it would have to have been pretty small. The depth around there is in the ten to fifteen feet range at low tide -- which it wasn't."

"Wasn't what?"

"Low tide," Callahan said.

"You said the victim was obliterated? Anyone hear a weapon discharged?"

"No, and that's where this gets weird, Captain. There was blood everywhere, even on the woman's legs, and a huge blood trail led down to the water, but nothing solid remained. No bone fragments, no tissue residue, and the divers couldn't find anything in the water so I had the Crime Scene people get as much of a sample as they could off the woman's legs, just in case..."

"In case of what, Callahan? What kind of case are you calling this, because the DA sure isn't going to call this homicide."

"Sir?"

"Well, hell, Callahan, from what little you've told me this could have been some kind of goddamn sea creature, maybe an octopus or a squid of some kind, but it sure doesn't sound like one human being killed another."

Callahan shrugged. "Unless it was a human dressed up in some kind of costume..."

"That disappeared in a glowing green submarine? Seriously? That glow was more than likely some sort of bioluminescence..."

"So what do you want me to do with my report?"

"How did patrol sign off on it?"

"Signal One -- homicide -- according to their shift sergeant, but I assume the first watch homicide lieutenant approved that."

"Hell, Briggs ought to know better than that," Bennett growled, putting his coffee on his desk before he turned and looked out his window -- over the sun-dappled bay towards Alcatraz and Yerba Buena Island. "Well, hell. You'd better go over to the Steinhart, over to the Academy of Sciences, and see if anyone has any idea what kind of animal could have done this. Then you'd better go talk to that girl again, the one who first saw this creature. See if she can help us get this investigation pointed in the right direction."

"Okay."

"Before you do anything else, head on home and get a few hours of rack time, and then...ahem...don't forget to drag a razor over that furry thing growing on your neck."

Callahan grinned. "Aye-aye, Skipper!"

"And don't call me skipper!" Bennett shouted at Callahan's retreating grin as he turned and left the bureau.

+++++

Callahan walked up the short walk and knocked on the glass front door and waited; a few restless moments later a young woman walked up, and if her pale blue scrubs were any indication, she appeared to be a nurse. He watched as the woman walked up to the door; she opened it just a crack and looked at Callahan, casually sizing him up. "Yes?" the nurse said, clearly irritated by something going on in the house.

Harry held up his badge case as he studied the woman's reactions: "Inspector Callahan, San Francisco Police. I need to speak with Miss Weyland, please."

The nurse looked uncertain, as if she simply didn't know how to respond to a cop at the door, but after a long, drawn-out moment she nodded her head slowly then simply pulled the door to and led Callahan down an ornate marble-tiled hallway that led to an entry foyer, complete with opulent leather wingback chairs. Callahan noted a small room off the foyer that seemed to be dedicated to the fine art of smoking expensive cigars and drinking single malt scotch whisky.

"If you'll wait here, please?" the nurse said.

"Right," Callahan sighed as he stood by a tall window that looked out over the reflecting pool fronting the Palace of Fine Arts, the last remaining structure built for the 1915 Panama--Pacific International Exposition. He peeked through the door into the smoking room and saw that the seating in the smallish, wood-paneled room was arranged to take in what had to be the most exquisite view in the city. The towering sentinel columns that defined the colonnade seemed to lead from the smoking room right to the main rotunda, and Callahan stood, transfixed, by the utter perfection of the setting. A minute or so passed and then an elegantly dressed white-haired man came down the same marbled hallway from deep inside the huge house, and as the man walked up Callahan could almost feel the wealth oozing out of the man's pores.

"You're with the Police Department?" the man asked.

And Callahan nodded. "Yessir. Harry Callahan, Homicide. I'm going to need to speak further with Miss Weyland. Are you her father?"

"Would this be about last night?"

"Yessir."

"I see. Well, perhaps you weren't aware, but Devlin is unwell, and she has been most of her life. She hallucinates, she sees things that aren't really there, so is it possible that she hallucinated the events of last night, Mr. Callahan?"

"No sir. There were other witnesses that confirmed events as she described them."

"Remarkable. I didn't know that. I came over earlier this morning and had to sedate her -- as I thought she had hallucinated these events, but now you're telling me they actually happened?"

"Yessir. Excuse me, but are you a physician?"

"Yes. I'm the head of psychiatry up at General."

"I don't know what you've been told, Doctor, button employee of the yacht club was -- well, for want of a better word, he was vaporized -- and directly in front of Miss Weyland -- and another employee of the club. Two other employees located a little further from the scene observed some of this as it happened, as well," Callahan replied, cataloging the physician's appearance as they faced off, filing away the details in his mind -- just in case: white buttoned down shirt, laundered, heavy starch; a Hermes necktie, tannish gold with a small, repeating riding crop motif; black slacks, pressed, Gucci belt, Gucci loafers; hair on the medium-long side, blond turning white, neatly clean and combed, parted on the left; eyes hazel but with contact lenses; watch, Rolex Submariner; no wedding band or other jewelry.